KING OF EVERYTHING

Jinjer shot to fame within the metal world with a video of a live session performance of the song Pisces (which is one of the tracks on this album King of Everything) recorded at Istok Studio in Kiev, Ukraine. The vocalist Tatiana Shmayluk's incredible, unbelievable transitions from smooth clean vocals rendered in the vein of Gathering's Anneke Van Giersbergen to blood curling death growls. Additionally, her growls are deeper (like a male singer's growl) where typically female singers have a more high pitched, raspier growl. While the song was already there on the album, just watching the vocalist transition on video made the metal world go into raptures. And ever since, Jinjer has become like a well kept secret among metal musicians/singers. You suggest Jinjer to them (as I did) and they will share raving reviews about them (so they already know). The above mentioned video of Pisces as well as the video of Judgment and Punishment from Jinjer's 2018 release Macro are also popular among online vocal coaches who post reaction videos.

The song itself is brilliant not just for Tatiana's undeniably marvelous vocals but also for the versatility of the musicians and the beautifully conceived musical transitions. It is not just Tatiana who renders clean vocals in the vein of Anneke. The accompanying music too is in the vein of The Gathering with lovely guitar textures and very restrained, soft work on the drums. And then, they shift nimbly and literally at the flick of a switch to a brutal metal passage as Tatiana gets into growls. The vocal melody for the 'clean' portion is quite beautiful too.

In short, if every song on this album was as good as Pisces, this would be an unmatchable masterpiece of progressive metal with few peers. Yeah, not kidding.

Unfortunately, much of the rest, while extremely competently conceived and rendered, is much more generic. I have trouble distinguishing the other songs even after listening to the album several times. This is because where Pisces achieves a brilliant light and shade effect by contrasting the clean, atmospheric mellow sections with the 'growled' ones, the other songs offer a much more straight up, unrelenting brutal metal attack.

If anything, I find it quite strange that a band that could write a song as masterful as Pisces would not have waited a bit for more inspiration to kick in and write songs of a similar caliber. By that, I don't mind more Gathering-meets-Morbid Angel songs. I just mean songs that similarly open up incredible possibilities for metal.

This is not an unreasonable expectation for Judgment and Punishment is similarly stunning without evoking Gathering in the slightest. That is, Pisces is hardly a fluke. The band is certainly capable of more such brilliant, pathbreaking music. Well, I suppose the other, more straight up songs draw the metal fans into their shows so they serve their purpose alright.

But for this perhaps unreasonable and demanding reviewer, more of Pisces would have taken the album into a whole other tier of greatness. As it stands, I am going to reward the experimentation of Pisces with a four while noting that I would only give a three for the rest of the album.